Wet shirt surplus to requirements as Austen is taken the full monty
A SPIRITED heroine and a dashing suitor are standard Jane Austen fare. But nude bathing? That will be a first.
Andrew Davies, the screenwriter responsible for Colin Firth’s memorable lake scene in Pride and Prejudice, is tackling Austen’s work once more and this time wet shirts will be surplus to requirements.
He is adapting and completing Sanditon, the novel that Austen left unfinished on her death in 1817. “Jane Austen managed to write only a fragment of her last novel before she died – but what a fragment!” Davies said.
“Sanditon tells the story of the transformation of a sleepy fishing village into a fashionable seaside resort, with a spirited young heroine, a couple of entrepreneurial brothers, some dodgy financial dealings, a West Indian heiress, and quite a bit of nude bathing.”
Davies has previously revealed that he wanted Firth’s Mr Darcy to emerge naked from the lake in the 1995 Pride
Prejudice adaptation. “The wet shirt scene was supposed to be a total male frontal nudity scene, because that’s how men went bathing in those days,” he has said.
That is historically accurate, according to Dr Chloe Wigston Smith, of the University of York’s department of English and Related Literature. She said: “Research has suggested that fashionable bathers were drawn to the sea in ‘bathing machines’ – a small hut on wheels – where they would change out of their clothes.
“Men at the time had the privilege of bathing naked … but nearly all women would have worn some form of bathing outfit.”
ITV will broadcast Sanditon as an eight-part series next year.
Austen produced only 12 chapters before succumbing to illness at the age of 41, leaving critics divided on whether the chapters were an early or final draft.
Prof John Mullan, head of English Literature at University College London and author of What Matters in Jane Austen?, said: “Sanditon as a story is promising. But it does not have the dazzling, mischievous prose of her completed novels, in which there is hardly a dud sentence.”